1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a new type of electronic musical instrument. More particularly, it relates to an automatic electronic musical instrument which utilizes random inputs to produce pleasing musical sounds having a structured pattern in a non-repeating series of songs.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There are a wide variety of electronic musical instruments known in the art, including electronic organs, synthesizers and portable electronic musical instruments of the type described in McCoskey et al, U.S. Pat. No. 4,178,823, issued Dec. 18, 1979. Such prior art electronic musical instruments utilize either a plurality of oscillators or frequency divider networks for producing musical output frequencies in response to keyboard closures or other inputs, which select frequencies corresponding to desired musical sounds.
In addition to selecting the desired musical frequencies by the manual playing of a keyboard, it is also known to use a computer program for the selection of the frequencies to produce the musical output in accordance with a desired pattern. However, the preparation of such programs for controlling the output of an electronic musical instrument is laborious and time consuming, as well as requiring both a high level of technical sophistication and musical knowledge. As a result, users of prior art electronic musical instruments must either develop the ability to play the instrument manually in a manner comparable to any other type of musical instrument or provide a different program for each different composition to be played.